Tor Website blocked at My Hotel

My hotel uses OpenDNS to block access to the Tor website. Google Translate is also blocked. They are categorized as “Proxy/anonymizer”. This is one of the most annoying things about filtering. I just wanted to quickly translate some text from Russia to English and then read the Tor blog and ….

Yes, in order to block the Tor Blog, which uses HTTPS, they are MITM’ing SSL. (If you accept the bad certificate, the Tor Blog is blocked.) It doesn’t look like they are MITM’ing *all* SSL but just connections to selected IP addresses.

It’s funny, because I often recommend OpenDNS to people in order to avoid filtering, but OpenDNS also has a filtering service.

4 comments.

Well, since you’re on a Mac you could try the built-in Translation Widget next time. It still requires an Internet connection but uses the translation services of Systran. It doesn’t handle as many languages as Google but it would have handled the Russian to English translation for you. Although, due to the interface, it’s really only good for single words or short phrases.

As for being blocked by the Hotels use of the OpenDNS filtering service I believe you could have worked around that, at least temporarily. Once you received an IP address from the DHCP server you could have changed your configuration to manual and reused the same address. The DHCP server should have reserved that address for at least and hour. Once you configured the IP address manually you could configure your DNS settings to use another public DNS service. easyDNS provides such a service at DNSresolvers.com. Just enter one or both of the following IP addresses in the DNS fields in the Network settings in System Preferences.